Monday, February 9, 2009

What occupies your life?

There is a place that I love. A place that had an incredible impact on my life. A place where I really first experienced God and watched God reach into others hearts. A place where I first sat with a person and led them through a prayer as they accepted God's gift of eternal life.

And now, that same place seems to have changed. The place that was so attractive to everybody and created such an amazing environment for God to do what only he can do is not the same. Now I know...everything changes. Nothing stays the same. And staying the same may be worse than changing, but the questions is HOW are we changing and to WHAT are we evolving?

This idea is extremely important to our church. As we evolve and change, I hope more than anything that we always are more preoccupied with those we can reach rather than focusing on those that we can keep. Not that I want to run the Christians off, but if we have to focus on ONLY one group, I hope we always lean towards those people not sitting in our seats on Sunday mornings. It just drives me nuts to see churches or other Christian organizations intentionally, or more often subconsciously, make decisions that revolved around making insiders happy at the expense of the outsider. And when this happens, the church can quickly become an insider focused organization, also making it an outsider irrelevant organization. I never want to lead or be associated with an organization that looks like that. That sounds like a Christian organization that is very unChristian.

I hope we never become irrelevant or incorrectly focused as a church. Who are the people not sitting at Watermarke on Sunday mornings...let's be sure we are focused on them, not us!